Psychz Networks, a company that offers DDoS mitigation services, is pleased to announce that thanks to their innovative and thorough DDoS mitigation service, they were able to successfully protect one of their valued clients from a huge Mirai botnet DDoS attack that took place in 2016.
“We are discussing this attack now to ensure that it didn’t impact the investigation by the authorities,” the spokesperson said.
The trouble began last August when the client canceled their DDoS mitigation service with another service provider. In order to try to gain this client back, the service provider used an anonymous Gmail account to extort the client, using a multi-gig attack.
In the email, the competitor company asked the former client to pay 10BTC (bitcoin), or else the attack would commence. As the spokesperson for Psychz explained, this email and extortion was merely a ruse by the competitor company to show their former client that DDoS mitigation is always needed and that they were making a mistake by cancelling their service with them.
“The client contacted us when there was a multi-vector attack against their network,” the spokesperson said, adding that when the client contacted Psychz for help, they only requested 10 Gbps mitigation plan which is not able to mitigate any attack over 10 Gbps and would lead to IP null routing.
After realizing that the attacks were much bigger than expected, and exceeding local peering points that caused problems within the region, the team at Psychz anycasted all of the prefixes to ensure they could stop the attack and minimize the saturation points.
“Once we anycasted the attack we logged the attack to be close to 300-400 Gbps,” the spokesperson said.
“In these large attacks, we go through a procedure of forensics to detect, trace, and get information on the botnet used to send to law enforcement or get a grasp on who carried out the attack. Typically we have a firm understanding who carries out large attacks such as these, as all botnets have a signature and pattern.”
What made this particular DDoS attack stand out, noted the spokesperson, is that reaching the 300-400 Gbps mark of attack is not standard on booters. Psychz’s team of engineers were also intrigued to see how more IoT’s were used. The IoT’s were protected against telnet during the attack, which made it harder to trace and ultimately kill the botnet.
Thanks to their hard work and dedication, the team from Psychz was able to halt the attack which lasted 4-5 days, and their client is still in business.
“Typically an internet company cannot survive a week’s worth of attacks and being offline,” the spokesperson noted.
In a creepy twist, the spokesperson noted that the attacker later emailed Psychz’s abuse department and said that if they did not stop protecting their former client, Psychz would be the next target of a DDoS attack. If this should happen, the spokesperson is confident that Psychz’s expert DDoS protection services will prevent any damage from occurring.
About Psychz
Psychz has been in the Web Hosting Industry since 2001 and now operates its own infrastructures, networks, and in-house staff. Psychz specializes in Dedicated Servers, Colocation, and DDoS mitigation services in their Los Angeles, Dallas, Ashburn, London, Amsterdam, and Johannesburg data centers. With years of experience, proper disaster planning has been implemented to preserve enterprise level data and services. For more information, please visit https://www.psychz.net/.
